Dance with the Devil

then?”
        “We picked up skis and used the lift.”
        “We can't ski down, though,” Katharine said. “Not in this weather.”
        “We'll walk it.”
        “Are you serious?” she asked.
        “It won't be hard,” Kerry Markwood assured her. “I know these woods as well as my own back yard. We'll cut into the trees over there, until the pines are so thick that the snow isn't very deep under them. Then it ought to be a cinch to follow the mountain to its base and strike back to where the Rover is parked.”
        “Well…” she said, trying to express all of her doubts in the single word.
        “Would you rather stay here?” Michael asked.
        “I guess not.”
        “Come on, then,” he said. “You follow Kerry, and I'll be right behind you.”
        The blond boy lead them across the brink of the mountain to the other side of the ski run, then into the trees. The sound of the wind changed, became a distant soughing high overhead, no longer a biting force on all sides.
        Soon, they turned and struck down the slope, guided expertly around the worst briar patches and through the most confusing thrusts of limestone by the Markwood boy who moved as surely as if he were leading them across someone's living room. When the way grew treacherous, the two men helped Katherine forward, and she did not fall once under their careful ministrations.
        In a few minutes, they came to a large circle in the trees where the snow seemed to have been beaten down by a number of booted feet, though Markwood kept the flashlight beam too high for her to be certain of that. Here, in the middle of nowhere, for no reason that she could readily discern, they stopped.
        “I'm not tired,” she said.
        “Nor I,” Markwood said cheerfully enough.
        “Me either,” Michael said, and laughed.
        “Then why-”
        Michael pulled off his scarf and pushed his toboggan hat slightly off his forehead now that the cold was not so fierce. He said, “This is as far as we go. For now, anyway.”
        “What do you mean?” she asked.
        Somehow, she wished that the wind were not so distant, that it was still all around them and that it could drown out his words. She knew she was not going to appreciate what he had to say.
        “This is where we meant to bring you,” Markwood said. “Here and no farther.”
        “Is this where the evidence against Alex can be found?”
        Abruptly, other people began to appear around them, stepping out from behind trees and rounded teeth of milestone. None of them spoke or made any noise as they came forth. She recognized many of them from the long afternoon of conversation in the cafe.
        “Michael?” she asked, turning to him for an explanation.
        “Meet the family,” he said. “We don't go any farther, Katherine, because this is where the family is- and this is where the dance is soon going to take place.”

CHAPTER 16
        
        Katherine stared at him, sure that it must be a joke or that she had misunderstood. “The cult?” she asked, finally.
        “The family,” he corrected. “We are a family in Satan.”
        “It can't be!”
        “But it is.”
        “Michael, you're too sensible to-”
        He frowned. “What makes you think that Satanists are not sensible? Do you believe that Christianity holds the only true answers and that the rest of us are madmen? Well, it isn't so, not at all. There, are alternate paths through this life, and we have simply chosen one of them in preference to the road most traveled by.”
        She did not know whether he realized he was distorting a poem by Robert Frost, but the irony of the similarity of thought was almost funny. Almost.
        “Let's begin,” Michael said.
        The others moved toward the center of the circle and began to clear away some of the snow. Still others carried in dry wood which they must have brought along with them, and they began to prepare material for a bonfire.
        “Then Alex isn't anything you said he was.”
        “Not a Satanist, no.”
        “You lured me out of Owlsden on the pretext of-”
        “Don't be indignant, Katherine,” he said, smiling benignly on her. “You'll thank me later tonight, when you've been taken into the family.”
        “I don't want to be in your crazy family,” Katherine said, taking a step toward him, hoping to plead a case he would listen to.
        “Not